Cloud Native Transformation

Chapter 10. Patterns for Infrastructure and Cloud

Once upon a time (and not very long ago), infrastructure meant one thing: provisioning your own on-premise hardware. Cloud computing has radically expanded this definition. Today, enterprise market infrastructure can mean a public or private cloud, on- or off premises, utilizing virtualization, containerization, or serverless (functions as a service) computing—or any combination.

By comparison, legacy infrastructure has become akin to a physical anchor slowing you down and stopping your enterprise from changing. Buying servers, housing them, and configuring, provisioning, and maintaining them takes a great deal of time, attention, and money. For some companies there are still a few advantages to owning your own servers, but most are better off embracing the cloud. All the somewhat abstract changes you are making to your strategy, organization, culture, and processes to deliver software in a fast, responsive way, all the flexibility you are gaining, must be supported on a physical level by appropriately nimble infrastructure.

The entire point of going cloud native is gaining the ability to adjust course quickly. If you want to create stability in an increasingly uncertain environment, the best way to get it is to be able to respond to change quickly. That sounds like an oxymoron, but hear us out. Knowing that it will take you a long time to respond if a disruptor comes along in your market creates constant anxiety. But if you know ...